Abstract
Much debate in translation studies has been spurred by Jorge Luis Borges’s work, with discussions chiefly beginning with his fiction Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) and the production that followed. Nonetheless, he had already dealt intensively with translation issues in previous writings from the fifteen years preceding that great watershed in his oeuvre. Between 1925 and 1936, Borges wrote a small set of essays directly concerning translation, largely based on either personal endeavors (a Spanish rendition of the last page of Joyce’s Ulysses) or third-party translations of classics (namely, the works of Homer and the Arabian Nights). The present paper reviews these early essays by Borges and outlines the major translation-critical concerns addressed by them. A case is made that Borges’s later reflections on and contributions to translation issues were directly or indirectly contained in nuce in his early essayistic output.
Keywords
Jorge Luis Borges; Essays; Translation